Posts Tagged ‘resources’

I’m edemmester, a 15 years old child from Hungary and in this post I want to write a bit about my experiences. Sorry if my sentences are hard to understand, maybe my English isn’t the best.

Introduction

When I was a little child (1st or 2nd class in primary school), I askd my dad: “Dad! How can I create a webpage for my LEGO city?”. I asked this again and again and one day my father gave me a paper with the HTML basics on it. I was very happy so I ran to the computer and I started to build my first webapge. There was no CSS, no JS, no PHP, only HTML. After this basic site I started to learn more and more things from the internet. At the beginning it was hard because the Hungarian documentations aren’t as good as the English docs, but after few years I learned the English language and since then I use the English websites, for example w3schools.com . I learned CSS, JavaScript, PHP, and MySQL database managment and after theese I learned VB.net and I use my knowledge in my free time. Now I’m attending to a secondary school where we learn programing (now in C# but few years later we will learn C++). This is my second year in this school and it is amazing!

My 1st Ludum Dare

I saw some Hungarian videos about Ludum Dare games and in April I visited thiswebsite and I thought that I should make a game too so when the competitions started then I started the programing. My first LD game was Orpheus (the idea is from the book “Gift” by Andrea J. Buchanan). The beginning was a bit hard because I had no ideas but a few hours later I started planning this game. Okhay, the result is not as good as I expected, but I think it is a useable game.

It was a very good experience because I learned a lot! I never used the HTML5 canvas in published webapps before this so I had to read some documents about it. Since then I learnd more about canvas and now I see that the Orpheus game is programmed terrible, that can be much better and much more optimised, but that is working!

My 2nd Ludum Dare

Yes, it was now. I’m the creator of the game called Dreamland. It was a hard 2 days because I was on holiday in England and I arrived home about 16 hours after the competition’s beginning so I had very few time to create something awesome and now I learned lots of things again.

To this game I had to plan some new algorithms I never used before and it was interesting. I like creating new interesting stuff. Okhay, I don’t like debugging but that is a part of the programing.

Resources

When I planned the design of theese games I planned very basic designs so the images were easy to create but I never thought about the sound. I can’t create good sounds so the background music was very hard to create and it’s weird and terrible BUT NOT NOTHING so you can hear that (if you use a supported browser) I tried to create something awesome.

Closure

I think Ludum Dare is a very good place to try to program something awesome. It is challenging and I think this is a place where you can REALLY test your knowledge because the more you know, the faster you can work. If you wasn’t created LD games before but you like programing then come and create a game to the next Ludum Dare! I will be here! And you?

Random music composition tools. Better music means more polished games. Random generators are fantastic for inspiration, even to hardcore composers. Compiled with the help of Zeik and ChainedLupine in the LD chatroom.

These are all free except Easy Music Composer, and ACS which is shareware and in my opinion is amazingly useful even without a pro license. For me at least, ACS has an almost 1:1 ratio of success; it prompts immediate inspiration. I’ve personally found Wolframtones to produce quite meaningful ideas as well

Greasemonkey’s Autotracker-Bu <- Run “python autotracker.py”, you will get an .it file, then use your favorite tracker ( like http://schismtracker.org/wiki/Schism%20Tracker ) to export it to .wav or .mp3. ( link and description provided by jarnik )

For those of you without a lick of musical talent, there is hope for getting something music-like in your game.

First, see this LD post. The link in that post is dead but there appears to be a version up on github. Note that the Ludum Dare tools page links to an earlier version of autotracker, but that link is dead too. See my LD23 entry for a sample of the music generated, though it creates a variety of tempos and moods that all sound very 8-bit. The general approach is to generate a ton of songs and pick the one that best fits. You can load the output into a tracker to mess with it if you have more talent than I.

Next up, for a little more control, there’s Lemon’s Procedural Music Generator. You control the number of tracks, instruments used, and algorithm+seed for each track. It uses your default midi device, so it will probably sound very 8-bit. Record is supposed to export to midi, but it wasn’t working for me, so manually recording the audio is probably the only other thing to do.

Lastly, Otomata creates music with a very particular feel to it. Here’s an example of something that I put together when I should have been working. You have control of how many automata there are and what their starting orientation and position are. After that, they follow some simple rules to make sounds.

It’s probably worth mentioning WolframTones. It can produce a variety of music, but the license excludes it from any real use. This post has a discussion on it.

Hopefully one of these resources will help someone out. If anyone has any other resources, please reply!

Well it’s taken about… 18 hours? Like 18-20 hours. By the time I had finished up the map, mouse scrolling, forests, mountains, houses, roads, skyscrapers, and the bulldozer, I felt like there was more than enough in Simini to justify its release into the world of Ludum Dare #23.

So here is the rundown. Simini is a miniature Sim City-esque game, though at the moment not nearly as deep. You have three kinds of structures you can build: Houses, Roads, and Skyscrapers. Houses generate resources based on what’s around them. So, for instance, if a house is placed near a forest, it will generate 1 wood per second.

Roads are basically like… the Zerg creep. You can only build houses, skyscrapers, and other roads within the vicinity of a road. To alleviate the obvious problem of “well crap, what if I destroy everything?” the player can place one free road anywhere on the map if there are no other roads. Roads are also the only structure that can be built over water and are therefore the only way you can access the other islands… for now. Airports are on the list for buildings I want to include in the future.

Skyscrapers generate money. Money doesn’t have any use yet, but I’d like to think in a future update it could be used for other kinds of buildings and potentially even public projects like parks or random events. Skyscrapers need to be placed near houses, so essentially they’re a resource generator that you build.

The other two icons you’ll notice on the bottom are the hand icon and a bulldozer. The hand switches you back to the default pointer. The bulldozer lets you destroy anything you’ve built and get back 50% of its resources. Will be handy later on when I can figure out resource destruction. I’d much prefer it if resources ran out after a specific amount of time, making them more limited in the world. The bulldozer will also be great when there are more building types and you feel like redesigning a town.

As per the rules of Ludum Dare, the source “code” is included, but as it is an MFA file you will need Multimedia Fusion to open it. The game itself currently only runs in Windows. I made a Flash test version and, trust me, you don’t want to play a 62×78 game with mouse scrolling in Flash. With the standalone version, however, you can hit Alt-Enter to fullscreen for a much less frustrating experience.

I will definitely keep picking at Simini as the year continues and get it into a form good enough for the IGF Pirate Kart. For now, hope you enjoy what I managed to whip up in well under the Ludum Dare time limit!

So I’ve been looking back as far as October for this post for indie devs. It was a link to the ultimate list of resources from actually setting out your indie development company, legal info, sprite/code resources, and etc. I looked through it with glee all those months ago but forgot to bookmark it D: If anyone can point me in the direction of this magnificent post, please don’t hold back Thanks to anyone who helps or just reads this